The transition to the cloud has changed everything! It has upended where apps are hosted, as well as the movement of enterprises’ most valuable digital assets and sensitive data. Access has been redefined and firewall-based perimeters are a thing of the past. Now special considerations are required for users working from everywhere—on both managed and unmanaged devices—as well as address the ever-growing Internet of Things (IoT). Plus, new zero trust approaches unlock an entirely new paradigm to secure access by narrowing the attack surface, eliminating the risk from lateral movement due to compromised credentials or VPN vulnerabilities. Accordingly, this has changed how organizations of all sizes, across all verticals, employ security to harden their business and reduce risk, while at the same time look to reduce costs, gain efficiencies, and embrace greater agility.
We’ve seen this first hand at Netskope with the increased interest in the Security Service Edge (SSE), which ties into the larger framework of SASE and the inevitable convergence of networking and security. Beyond the security and compliance mindset of the CISO, for networking and infrastructure leaders this has triggered a refactoring of how to measure and ensure performance for users and applications, or what is commonly thought of as “digital experience.” With applications no longer in the enterprise data center, user access is shifting from relying on the legacy Wide Area Network (WAN) to being run across the public internet. Plus with users embracing hybrid work, sometimes in the office while other times remote, orienting digital experience on a cloud-centric approach is critical. These macro trends have shifted the best approach for ensuring a high-quality digital experience away from relying solely on agent-based approaches, synthetic data, or simulated traffic to more cloud-centric strategies with a focus on real user traffic and actionable insights.
The cloud is central to understanding digital experience
Powered by its NewEdge infrastructure, Netskope provides a cloud-native solution that focuses on securing and protecting all traffic—including web, cloud, SaaS, private apps, and more—for comprehensive security addressing end-to-end transactions. This begins when the user first connects and their traffic on-ramps to NewEdge—regardless of whether in the branch or working remote—followed by real-time and inline security traffic processing, and finally through to the apps, services, or data the users are accessing. At the core of the Netskope strategy is delivering on digital experience to ensure a smooth transition to the cloud and applying advanced, context-aware, and data-centric security without sacrificing performance. Bottom line, if the user experience suffers or apps are slow and unresponsive, then productivity is impacted and users may try